“We hardly noticed a change when September came. But I know now that everything that will ever matter in my life began then.”
The military establishment has little care for the kind of men it puts through its meat grinder. Some are men of action who learn to do by doing and seek results with little thought for the implications of their deeds; others need to conceive of an activity before they can put it in motion and examine the motivations and the consequences of their actions. This is not a judgment call involving rights and wrongs, just a statement of fact. The present author is obviously one of the latter. The extremis of war has moved sensitive, thinking individuals to write poetry and prose about their war experiences for centuries. The elegiac prose this writer uses is in obscene contrast to the experiences he describes. America may have the largest, mightiest military machine the world has ever seen but its young men are paying a terrible price for that ascendancy.
Every person has to find his/her own means of dealing with Post Dramatic Stress. Some become addicted to the hyper-sensitivity of the environment and re-up finding themselves dead inside and unfeeling without it. Some go into denial and their demons manifest in often violent unpredictable ways. And some find release by writing about it as a means of working through their nightmarish inner tensions as a growing mountain of books will attest. That a war experience should provide the defining moment of a person’s life....?
A yellow bird
witha yellow bill
sat up upon
my windowsill
i lured him in
with a piece of bread
and then i smashed
his yellow head
I believe this version has been cleaned up for public consumption.
The sensation of combat is described as that feeling you get when you know you’re about to be in a car accident but you haven’t hit yet, only it lasts for hours and days at a time. Returning home is quite another matter. Dreaming of lost buddies. Waking and reaching for your weapon that isn’t there. Hyper vigilance, always scoping your surroundings looking for ambush and assessing where to find cover. Startling at every little noise.
The lassitude and depression settles in. How do you define insanity in a world insane? This is not a book for the squeamish and will not leave you feeling better for having read it as the author retires to his isolated cabin in the Blue Ridge at age 34.
The military establishment has little care for the kind of men it puts through its meat grinder. Some are men of action who learn to do by doing and seek results with little thought for the implications of their deeds; others need to conceive of an activity before they can put it in motion and examine the motivations and the consequences of their actions. This is not a judgment call involving rights and wrongs, just a statement of fact. The present author is obviously one of the latter. The extremis of war has moved sensitive, thinking individuals to write poetry and prose about their war experiences for centuries. The elegiac prose this writer uses is in obscene contrast to the experiences he describes. America may have the largest, mightiest military machine the world has ever seen but its young men are paying a terrible price for that ascendancy.
Every person has to find his/her own means of dealing with Post Dramatic Stress. Some become addicted to the hyper-sensitivity of the environment and re-up finding themselves dead inside and unfeeling without it. Some go into denial and their demons manifest in often violent unpredictable ways. And some find release by writing about it as a means of working through their nightmarish inner tensions as a growing mountain of books will attest. That a war experience should provide the defining moment of a person’s life....?
A yellow bird
witha yellow bill
sat up upon
my windowsill
i lured him in
with a piece of bread
and then i smashed
his yellow head
I believe this version has been cleaned up for public consumption.
The sensation of combat is described as that feeling you get when you know you’re about to be in a car accident but you haven’t hit yet, only it lasts for hours and days at a time. Returning home is quite another matter. Dreaming of lost buddies. Waking and reaching for your weapon that isn’t there. Hyper vigilance, always scoping your surroundings looking for ambush and assessing where to find cover. Startling at every little noise.
The lassitude and depression settles in. How do you define insanity in a world insane? This is not a book for the squeamish and will not leave you feeling better for having read it as the author retires to his isolated cabin in the Blue Ridge at age 34.
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